“Toe 2 Toe” (mixed media collage, 2025)
I am a poet, artist, editor, teacher,, and retired librarian who, after 35 years in Austin, Texas, resettled to a new home in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2015 with my husband, David Meischen, where we both continue to thrive as writers and publishers (Dos Gatos Press).
Some highlights of my personal writing career: My first Pushcart nomination, in 2008, was for “Playing GI Joes,” nominated by HeartLodge. “Egret Sonnet” was nominated by Hobble Creek Review for the 2011 Sundress Best of the Net, as well as a Pushcart! “Formations,” another sonnet, was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart by the very same Hobble Creek Review. I received two Pushcart nominations (2021 and 2020) from San Pedro River Review–for “Monsoon Season” and “Another Four in the Morning.” My most recent Pushcart nomination (2025) is from Cold Moon Journal for “closed clinic.” In 2023 I received my first Touchstone Award nomination, for “yellow to red” in Poetry Pea, and in 2024 I received my second, for the monoku “one hit wondering how it came to this” in Prune Juice. Another monoku in 2024 (“the chilly silence of snow angels”) won third place in the Maya Lyubenova International Haiku contest. In 2025 I received three more Touchstone nominations, one from Drifting Sands for the haibun “Straightforward,” one from Sense & Sensibility for “paper cranes,” and one from Circle of Salt for the monoku “rusted fence how we bleed without knowing”.
Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, my third book, was one of three Finalists for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award! And in 2021 I was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, along with two other poets, Kevin Prufer and Allison Hedge Coke.
In March 2020, “Johnsburg” was featured in American Life in Poetry chosen by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. It is also featured now on the esteemed Poetry Foundation website. “Reveries While Walking the Mesa on the Hottest Day of the Year” earned a Laureates’ Choice Award in the 2020 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, the second time in five years I placed a sonnet in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest (the first was for “Birding in Fog” in 2015). And in other sonnet news, my sonnet “Tracks” placed as Second Honorable Mention (5th place) in the Modern Sonnet category of the 2021 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. In 2022, I made the Long List for the Penrose Poetry Prize, and one of my haibun, “To Get There” was included in the annual Red Moon anthology of best English-language haibun for 2022, my third time making one of the esteemed anthologies. In 2023, during the month of April, I was the guest editor for the Haiku Foundation’s Haiku of the Day feature. All of the haiku I selected are related to the topic of LGBTQ+. Two cheribun (cherita & prose) placed in the 2024 MacQueen’s Quinterly Cheribun Contest, “Brothers in Blood” (short listed) and “The Things I Do for Porn” (long listed); in 2025, two more, “Voices from Each Side of a Triangle” (short listed) and “When I Knew: Second Grade” (long listed).
So far in 2026, I have served as one of the two judges of the Nicholas A. Virgilio Haiku and Senryu Memorial Contest alongside friend and co-judge Anna Eklund-Cheong, taken over as head of the Albuquerque Haiku Society of America group ABQ-Haiku, and been selected to the panel for the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun alongside Billie Dee and Peg Schneider. Plus, I had two of my collages selected for Sonic Boom’s World Collage Day online chapbook (the two are below)>
“Cranes Stepping Out” (mixed media collage, 2026) and “Glances” (braided collage, 2026)